Ignite – Hamburg is set on fire

Almost two weeks ago, more than thirty idea lusting people came together to exchange some of their thoughts, their passion and their experience. Still it’s hard to reflect the whole thing. For me personally the Ignite Hamburg was a blast. A blast of motivation, a blast of inspiration and a blast of fun.

In my opinion Hamburg is set on fire. Hamburg is burning when it comes to ideas and motivation. There is so much going on in the city. That night I was really happy and proud to live here.

Ok, at first I should start with a litte summary (and not with the conclusion):

During the first week of march, the Global Ignite Week took place in more than 80 cities. Besides Hamburg, the event was hosted in the German cities Berlin, Munich and Frankfurt.

The idea is pretty simple: you put a dozen of creative and motivated people into one room and let them talk about any topic possible for 5 minutes. Each of them gives a little insight into their lives, their passion or their ideas. And in order to prevent the presentations of getting too boring, Brady Forrest and Bre Pettis came up with the idea to implement some standards. Every presentation must consist of 20 slides, each slide will be displayed for 15 seconds and will change automatically. This format was one reason that we could here 12 presentations that night without getting tired, bored or overloaded. It was all perfect.

But now I wanna thank all attendees for the perfect night. Not only the ones who presented something also those people who came to get ignited. It was the first event I organised. My presentation was about why we were all together at that evening, why that event came to Hamburg. Unfortunately the stream swallowed some minutes of my presentation otherwise I would embed the talk here. But to make it short it was a combination of spontaneity, fortuity and getting your ass up to do it.

I really wanted to attend an Ignite event. But there was none in Hamburg, and I wasn’t able to travel to another one. Like we heard it often that night, I thought “Just do it!” So we did it. Julian, Jonas, and me. Maybe not everything was perfect, but still it was one of the best events I’ve been to for a long time. I don’t want to praise myself into the skies but I was really happy and satisfied.

And other people gave me the feedback as well. I was relieved when all the presenters told me that they were really happy to have given a talk. And people asked me if we will make another Ignite soon. Or suggested that we shall make it bigger the next time. And there is several feedback in some other blogs: Stilpirat Steffen wrote about the event and supported us with some great pictures with his new camera. (all the pictures in this blog post were shot by him). Martin was one who got infected by the motivation and inspiration of the talks. Moritz says our event was fizzy, multifaceted and entertaining.Max, who talked about his project Talentarena and whose conclusion is a quote of Stefan (who talked bout his baby bornintents): “Expect the best, be prepared for the worst, fuck what others think & do your own thing”. I was really happy that Marcel brought himself to give a talk, and that he was the one who made our live stream quiet busy.

All the presentation will be available in our youtube channel. It will take a while until I am finished with all the videos but they will follow.

Conclusion:

What I really liked about the Ignite in Hamburg was the fact that the talks were totally different. Not too much online stuff. All speakers were passionate about their topics. And most of them had a connection to Hamburg, which gave a little affinity to the city.

The next Ignite is about to come. It was definitely not the last one. But we are not quiet sure if we want to make it bigger the next time. We want to form and grow. We all want development, we saw that at the event. But like the true phrase says: size doesn’t matter. We want to make it better, not only bigger. We will see. But I can assure you, there will be a similar event this summer in Hamburg, stay tuned! Currently the SXSW is taking place in Austin, Texas. I know it’s way too big but maybe we can make something between the Ignite Hamburg and the SXSW, who knows?

6 Comments

Manos

Well my dear Markus, I still didn´t get what was your presentation about?! What did you achieve with it? Maybe I overread something, but I only got, that you´re very happy about it :-)….Greetz from Dresden

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